Giuliano da Empoli, an Italian political analyst and former adviser to the Italian prime minister, follows his bestselling novel The Wizard of the Kremlin with a short, mordant essay on what he calls the new 'predators' reshaping global politics: autocrats, oligarchs, and the tech billionaires who increasingly operate as a fourth branch of statecraft. Da Empoli argues that the post–Cold War order, with its rules-based diplomacy and norms of liberal restraint, is being supplanted by a politics of impulse and spectacle, in which power flows to whoever can move fastest, dominate attention, and inflict the most pain on rivals. He draws on his time inside European governments and his reporting from the global political circuit—New York, Riyadh, Davos, Mar-a-Lago—to sketch the shared sensibility uniting figures as different as Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. The argument is less a partisan tract than a study of temperament: the predator, in da Empoli's account, treats politics as a hunt, governed not by interest or ideology but by the appetite for domination. Written with the brisk, aphoristic style of a European essayist, the book is a useful primer for readers trying to understand why old institutions look so suddenly fragile and what kind of political imagination the moment requires.